Mindful of Whiteness

The same mindfulness and meditation practices you use to reduce your stress, increase your well-being, and connect you spiritually can empower you to make the world a better place. It’s not just a personal practice, it’s interpersonal. We are all related and we are all affected by injustice.

We are all the result of our conditioning, most of which is unconscious and invisible. Mindfulness and Compassion practices help make our conditioning visible and give us choice: We can act out our conditioning or, instead, we can act from our intentions.

To end racism, it is imperative that we white folk understand our own racial identity and work together to overcome the legacy of white supremacy in America. In the absence of compassionate awareness of our racial conditioning and mindful efforts to change our relationship to whiteness and racialization, we will continue to be unintentional participants in perpetuating and sustaining racial injustice.

If you identify as white and you notice you have a strong reaction to the idea and description of this class, we invite you to pay attention to the opportunity to learn more about yourself and the cultural conditioning that sources that reactivity. Join us to explore and better understand the history of racism in America and the ongoing effects of this history on people of color and white people. Learn about whiteness, racialization, implicit bias, colorblind racism, and their effects on people of color and white people. Develop mindfulness and compassion skills to better know your conditioning and provide you with conscious choices regarding your intentions, actions and effects.

This group will be a protected place for us to express anger, fear and confusion and to ask questions and explore. Our goal is to begin and engage in conversations and practices that can lead to our being more intentional about the effects of our presence in the world. Stumbling is inevitable. Join us and learn to be more skillful, more effective, and more just.